6 ms·

What enabled us to create AI is the thing it has the power to erase

84 points by delaugust 2y ago

brk 2y ago
This reads like someone who doesn't have a solid understanding of the underpinnings at generative AI. Every major technology progression has come with 'sky is falling' predictions. Generative AI accelerates the productivity of productive people, and potentially replaces the efforts of button-pusher types adding minimal value or creative input to a process. Not entirely different than personal computers, robots, locomotives, printing presses, and so on.
- realce 2y ago
  Eventually we will pull the black ball out of the urn. It is the responsibility of those currently alive to assess the possible harm their creations might cause. This cynical invincibility complex is becoming a tacit allowance of extreme danger. It's not some annoyance for people to act responsible, and not all technological achievements are the same as ones previously produced.
  - tarr11 2y ago
    > Eventually we will pull the black ball out of the urn What is this reference?
    - consumer451 2y ago
      Seems like it might be this? https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
    - realce 2y ago
      https://mishayurchenko.me/2019/03/27/pulling-a-black-ball-from-the-urn/ https://mishayurchenko.me/2019/03/27/pulling-a-black-ball-fr...
    - zero_shift 2y ago
      In the 18th and 19th centuries, gentlemen's clubs would vote whether to accept a new member. Each man would secretly place a ball in an urn, either black or white. If your urn contained even one black ball, your membership was vetoed and your chances - ruined.
      - realce 2y ago
        I had forgotten the stem of this, thank you!
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- oilkillsbirds 2y ago
  I have a solid understanding of AI, and it will destroy the value of most human work, creative and non-creative. The power to do exactly what your job is with the push of a button, for free, in seconds. If it's not already here, it's coming. Ubiquity kills the value of anything. Anything short of an actual boycott on AI produced work/art will result in this.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    What makes you correct, while the generations of your ancestors who said similar things weren't?
    - palata 2y ago
      What makes them wrong?
    - zero_shift 2y ago
      Were they incorrect? Most preventative measures were, at some stage, speculation or moral panics. For example our consumer laws emerged out of anxiety about poisonous food. Our libel laws emerged out of moral panics about misuse of the press. Etc. But were still good measures. There's also the asymmetric risk element. The social risks of the technology are larger than the material risks of putting it off. Being wary of that isn't Luddism, it's just math
    - joe_the_user 2y ago
      I don't think generations of my ancestors made any predictions about AI /s. I mean, an argument that "technology" hasn't eliminated work previously so we can assume it won't do so now is ridiculously broad. I don't even think current LLMs will eliminate all jobs - I think it's limited to a particular kind of mediocre output, an output the demand for which is very elastic. But an arguments about what "AI" can do should based on it's potential, not on some "technology has always created jobs" incantation.
    - notfed 2y ago
      To support the grand-post but reword it: we're on the verge of AI becoming a "great creativity equalizer". It used to be that each individual had a "skill level" on a scale from 0-100 for each practice, where very few people were above level 60. But now everyone can be a level 60+ artist, if they want to be. This lower limit will keep rising and, at a certain point (and maybe were talking 1000 years) it will be hard for anyone to differentiate any everyday media from human- vs AI-generated. Maybe equality is good? For utilities like locomotion, that sounds great. But for creativity? I think what will happen is a later generation will grow up bombarded by level-100 art and music. I guess that sounds net positive...right? As a musician, I can tell you one thing: part of what gives me drive to make music is knowing that what I'm creating is a scarce resource. (For example, if I realize one of my songs sounds like another existing song, it stops sounding good to me.) If it comes that AI can generate new songs for me, all of that value I assign to creating music is lost.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Like leaded gasoline and subprime CDOs? The dangerous interactions were already known, the risk-level was criticized, but there was money to be made...
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  Generative AI accelerates the productivity of productive people, and potentially replaces the efforts of button-pusher types adding minimal value or creative input to a process. I've seen this rough formula applied to earlier tech. But it's hard to see how, if AI/LLM usage consists of mainly in simple commands ("prompts"), it won't be about making people into "button-pusher types" or just empowering exactly those types. Indeed, one of the draws of generative AI is that it allows managers/marketers to get default mediocre illustrations for a text without having to consult with an artist or even a stock-photo agency (which peddled things made by artists - up until now).
  - brk 2y ago
    You are correct in those examples, but I think it also opens up new avenues for creation. I can design reasonably decent PCBs (up to 4 layers), I can hack together not-terrible code in a handful of languages from embedded-C (eg: ESP32 stuff) up to Windows or linux apps. But I absolutely suck at graphic design and basic layout. Many of my creative projects stall at the UI level, and rarely are they worth paying someone to help. I've been using genAI tools to help with design, layout, etc. things. I can also see the inverse, someone who may be good at design and can craft something that just oozes "use me", but perhaps they struggle with coding, genAI tools might allow them to use robust components, like ESP32's with attached touchscreens, to build things previously out of reach to them. This seems to me like something that can propel things forward, but potentially at the cost of a person whose previous job was mostly editing powerpoint slides on the corporate template.
- notfed 2y ago
  > This reads like someone who doesn't have a solid understanding of the underpinnings at generative AI. They're talking about the future, though. You are correct that they, nor you or I, have a solid understanding of technology in the future.
- trescenzi 2y ago
  I'm not sure we read the same piece. The title is hyperbolic, they all are these days, but the content is much more measured. And I suspect you might even agree with the second to last paragraph: > In my own practice, I’m learning to use AI not as a tool of compression, but one of expansion. Prompts become not endpoints but starting points. They create new voids to explore, new territories for my mind to inhabit.
- sonofhans 2y ago
  The examples you cite — PCs, robots, locomotives, printing presses — each caused various clear harms. LLMs will do the same. Waving off these harms as lack of understanding on someone else’s part doesn’t make them go away. Some of the things you haven’t listed — air conditioning, internal combustion engines, car-centric cities — are busy causing so much harm that our biosphere is showing the strain. Other things you haven’t listed — government-subsidized sugar production, sedentary lifestyles due to constant PC use — are busy causing so much harm to out bodies that humans are dying of simultaneous over-indulgence and despair. People warning about these harms were _right_, and in each case they were greeted by similar dismissiveness. No technology guarantees a rosy future. All of it has a cost, some of those costs are very heavy, and some are permanent.
  - brk 2y ago
    I think you're mixing in too many technologies. I used the examples I did because they were all things that essentially directly offset or replaced human labor. Air conditioners did not replace humans in jobs, they made indoor spaces more habitable. The internal combustion engine alone did not directly replace people, we didn't really have at that point humans turning cranks all day, the IC engine was a component of bigger machines. Several of the other examples you mentioned definitely had negative impacts as well as positive ones, but they were never really seen as creating risk to peoples ability to earn money. If anything, they created new industries and jobs. AI will definitely offset some jobs that are menial or able to be done with low cognitive effort. But historically those kinds of things have always been overtaken by the progression of human invention. Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned lamplighters as an example. "Jobs" are frequently replaced by progression. "Careers" less so (but not totally immune).
    - sonofhans 2y ago
      I understand your point about labor replacement. Consider your POV, though: one person’s “menial” is another person’s stretch goal; one person’s “low cognitive effort” is another person’s maximum capacity. What of these people? As the efficiency of our means of production increases, so too does its ability to leave behind those who are not your so-called “productive people.” Now, we have more than enough wealth in this country to solve that problem to everyone’s benefit, and I’d like to think that we will. However, some of those most directly involved and invested in bringing on the AI-powered future are literally right now attempting to gut the social safety net for the same country. So, truthfully, I don’t believe a word of it. I think that an AI-powered future is just another ladder that the super-privileged want to climb and then pull up after themselves.
- scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
  Yeah but this also doesn’t read like something that pretends to get into the underpinnings of AI. It’s about the friction that AI removes from making things and the discomfort with what that might mean. This point is fair and your take on productive people is reductive. People aren’t 1:1 factories. I’ve been watching my spouse participate in a seriously intensive prestigious typography course. It’s quite fascinating to watch how a part of the process involves slow walking through all of the tedious hand lettering stuff. Like mr. Miyagi level training. The depth and complexity of things they’re discovering and learning at a deep level by hand is quite enlightening. It would not be possible to convey other than by this process - to understand how to design typography you basically have to practically engage with how it was in every other earlier historical period. I believe this is the essence of the point of the article - that working through your ideas by hand involved lots of friction which was valuable in training you how to slow down your thinking. And now that is being done away and everyone can fart out nuanced BS and disregard anything that is more than a paragraph long.
KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
That's why it's so important for R1 to show the reasoning. The creative process has to be transparent and easily understood.
oilkillsbirds 2y ago
[flagged]
palata 2y ago
I totally agree with that feeling. I have been trying to use AI for coding. Sometimes it is very bad, but I got to learn when it is surprisingly good. Many times, the AI can show me some code that doesn't work, but that I can simply tune and make work. Many times the resulting code is good: it's not like some copy-pasting by someone who doesn't understand it. In a PR, nobody would think it's an AI, it could have been written by me. It was, in a way. But intellectually, I did much less. I did not have to imagine what kind of API may exist that solves the problem, or read the documentation about those candidate APIs. I did not have to build the code from the ground up, maybe starting with a simple case, then adding a loop, then going for tail recursion, and back to a loop, etc. Not doing that admittedly made me more productive. But it really feels like I didn't improve my skills by doing it. I didn't get to discover other parts of the API that I don't need right now but that may be useful later. I didn't get to build my intuition of whether a loop or tail recursion is better here. I just tuned stuff. What happens when I've been doing this for year and now need to debug that code? Will I have the intuition needed to find where it may be failing? Not clear to me. It feels similar to learning a language: I may understand a lot, and if people talk to me slowly and offer me different alternatives, I may be able to say "yes, the second one!". But by doing that I'm not improving my talking in this language. The only way to get fluent, I feel, is to make this effort of constructing sentences, looking for the words, finding ways or working around words I don't know, etc. If I don't do that, I will never be fluent. AI makes me more productive now, but may prevent me from becoming fluent at all.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  But it really feels like I didn't improve my skills by doing it. The process of finding the right prompt to get the most out of the LLM is programming. You aren't doing anything different, you just switched languages.
  - realce 2y ago
    Abstraction is the opposite of precision.
    - 2y ago
joshdavham 2y ago
> the resistance of a surface against a pen or pencil creates an important friction that works its way through your body and into your mind. That resistance is valuable; it forces us to slow down. Beautifully said and fully agree! In my personal work, I’m always trying to find ways to slow down my thinking when the problems get hard. Even using a pen vs a keyboard is a great way to do this.
ada1981 2y ago
I’m curious why the author choose to publish his message on the internet vs. walking door to door to spread it. It’s almost as if his desire to use technology was to collapse the process between idea and transmission. I appreciate a nostalgia for process to some extent. I enjoyed my 200km walk across the mountains Corsica far more than the plane ride from New Mexico to France… However it’s possible that you can actually become more aware of and participate in the larger process. Are I here to spend a month hand drawing my logo and refining it, or am I here to build an AI disaster response system to save a million lives? While I can see the appeal of these sort of arguments, and agree with much of it, I’m not sold on the value of process in itself in the larger arc of the process of creating actual value for the world.
- scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
  I guess let us know when you actually deliver that “AI disaster response system” because that’s the wild leap in your logic there. The author did not choose to express that it should all be done by hand. His point is that there is a value in slowing down your thinking by doing stuff by hand. Logos and unformed ideas being a mere example to illustrate a point. In your case it sounds like the equivalent would be to actually go out and participate in an actual disaster response effort before reaching for AI or using AI to tell actual responders how to do their job.
  - ada1981 2y ago
    Why stop at hand drawn logos though?
guybedo 2y ago
As technology evolves, humans lose their capacities as their tools get better. What's the average human's mental calculation capacities compared to our ancestors when the electronic calculator didn't exist ? Who can calculate integrals by hand nowadays ? AI is the ultimate tool. Who needs to get a phd when your computer can do the work / solve the task better than you would do and in a fraction of the time you'd require. Sure there's still gonna be a need for specialists but on average most humans are losing their capacities because their tools get better.
- angelsbrood 2y ago
  Then we need new capacities, attentive to our emergent means, and institutional frameworks capable of germinating them.
- techwiz137 2y ago
  Might be true, but I have a form of dyscalculia that made almost any sort of math impossible for me, so for this it doesn't affect me as I am not capable either way. But AI has taken away my ability to think to solve a problem via code. Now all I do is just ask it.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  > As technology evolves, humans lose their capacities as their tools get better. I don't follow this argument. Did humans become LESS capable when they invented a hammer?
  - palata 2y ago
    Surely we became less capable at solving that problem without a hammer.
    - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      If we had the hammer taken away we'd figure it out again. We got better at things, but we didn't actually lose any capacity.
educasean 2y ago
AI is quickly blurring the line between makers and curators. If the next wave of advancement in logo-generating AI will allow us to converse with it meaningfully and work with it as a creative director might work with her associate designer, is it really a fatal flaw that the AI is not able to conjure up an editable PSD file? Is it really necessary that the AI produce a pile of sketches that led to the final product instead of working backwards from the final design to fake a trail of inspirations? As curators we still need to slow down and take our time to ensure that the design we select is a good fit for whatever requirements we're working towards. I don't think a blazing fast AI necessarily erases that or takes that option away from us.
cyanydeez 2y ago
This, but all civilized society. Vaccines are a great example.
toprerules 2y ago
Technology has diminishing returns. If technology does everything for us then what's the point of existing.
nateburke 2y ago
All the AI researchers I know that also happen to be parents will not let their kids NEAR tools like chatgpt and photomath. No, it's "traditional" things for their kids that are CHALLENGING and require practice, like woodworking, learning an instrument, sports, memorizing texts for fun.
atomic128 2y ago
The use of LLMs for constructive activities (writing, coding, etc.) rapidly produces a profound dependence. Try turning it off for a day or two, you're hobbled, incapacitated. Anecdotally, ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw). Funny stuff. Competition in the workplace forces us down this road to being utterly dependent. Human intellect atrophies through disuse. In the arts, we see something different. People don't seem to like AI-generated content. For example, I monitor a random sample of recent pornography (random 4-second slideshow from all over the Internet, some scary stuff, see https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/ https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/) and AI-generated porn is still very niche, comparable in frequency to small fetishes like elder or latex or rope porn. I expected it to be more popular, but generally humans prefer something else. As Tim Cook recently said, (paraphrased) once you start using Apple Intelligence to think and work, it's hard to stop. Those skills that you no longer use will be lost. This is the profitable new addiction, and programmers like us are the first group of people to become hooked.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  The response among programmers honestly feels very bimodal. There seems to be the camp that just loves LLMs and have turned to Copilot for everything. Personally, I used it to mock unit tests and that's all I really trust it with. Once I get to a problem I can't easily solve it's something obscure enough that there isn't a lot of web traffic for it and Copilot falls over too, so I find myself rarely using it. Sometimes it's helpful as an intellisense, but a lot of the time it's too slow even for that. Its value as a text generator or, god help us, a search engine, has also run thin for me. I don't ever use it. I still prefer my google searches and going directly to sites.
  - palmotea 2y ago
    > There seems to be the camp that just loves LLMs and have turned to Copilot for everything. I wonder if that's the same camp that wrote crappy half-ass code before LLMs? There are a lot of people like that.
kazinator 2y ago
What evolved intelligent life is processes that intelligent life has the power to erase.
xenadu02 2y ago
I wonder... LLMs currently work because they have a huge corpus of data to train against. Data generated by humans. What happens when almost all available data is computer-generated? When no new training datasets are available? Will the models feed back on themselves? Will they stagnate and cease improving? Perhaps we'll enter a world where everything new and unique made by human authors (text, art, source code) is jealously guarded in an attempt to keep the LLMs out - lest even a single model learn it and spread it to all the others almost instantly making the original author's work worthless.
kazinator 2y ago
Image-to-vector software will produce an editable file out of a logo image. And there is AI for that! Within seconds of searching I found something called Vectorizer.AI, and others. Not sure how well they work, but the basic premise is that you could use any text-to-image AI to come up with a logo and then image to vector AI to create SVG that is likely editable. If that doesn't work well today, it likely will in two or three years.
Xen9 2y ago
The title is semantically questionable: - US? - AI has power to erase? I did not create AI & believe even autonomous AI systems are for time under human moral responsibility. The effect of AI socially obviously is that there will be no public forums, so we get back to middle ages, except the peasant is smarter & more obedient, which is a good mix for mental health issues. Regardless, when one needs more data: 1) Pick small nation with slow democracy & bureaucracy 2) Do massive AI horde campaign targeting politicians & keeping them busy 3) Simultaneously ship SpaceX connected drones in crates & humanoid robots. 4) Now the people cannot sleep in peace & you start gathering behavioral surplus very effectively. 5) Sell behavioral data & reinvest in sociological ruin of the government before they close OODA. The interesting step is what happens when standard baseline human has eventually no more surplus to give. I would guess models develop far enough that you can nudge the non-wallnut humans who don't care about privacy or anything to vote for candidates that then pass laws to outroot more eccentric people by cutting the rights to any sort of privacy. I personally believe in the instrumentalist view of philosophy of science & endorse the "instrumentarian power" term Zuboff coined for this. It's the very significant difference, Zuboff probably said it also but I cannot recall as I read the work young, that would you rather have no free will and no one else's interest dominates completely over yours or would you rather have no free will and some other human have chosen what matters? As endgame, such state makes lots of AI alignment literature paradigmatically obsolete.
tim333 2y ago
It's a nice essay but the premise that human intelligence and creativity will be erased because we'll have AI to do it seems a bit silly. I know a lot of people who use LLMs and it seems mostly unchanged in them.

84 points by delaugust 2y ago

brk 2y ago

This reads like someone who doesn't have a solid understanding of the underpinnings at generative AI. Every major technology progression has come with 'sky is falling' predictions. Generative AI accelerates the productivity of productive people, and potentially replaces the efforts of button-pusher types adding minimal value or creative input to a process. Not entirely different than personal computers, robots, locomotives, printing presses, and so on.

realce 2y ago
Eventually we will pull the black ball out of the urn. It is the responsibility of those currently alive to assess the possible harm their creations might cause. This cynical invincibility complex is becoming a tacit allowance of extreme danger. It's not some annoyance for people to act responsible, and not all technological achievements are the same as ones previously produced.
- tarr11 2y ago
  > Eventually we will pull the black ball out of the urn What is this reference?
  - consumer451 2y ago
    Seems like it might be this? https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
  - realce 2y ago
    https://mishayurchenko.me/2019/03/27/pulling-a-black-ball-from-the-urn/ https://mishayurchenko.me/2019/03/27/pulling-a-black-ball-fr...
  - zero_shift 2y ago
    In the 18th and 19th centuries, gentlemen's clubs would vote whether to accept a new member. Each man would secretly place a ball in an urn, either black or white. If your urn contained even one black ball, your membership was vetoed and your chances - ruined.
    - realce 2y ago
      I had forgotten the stem of this, thank you!
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
oilkillsbirds 2y ago
I have a solid understanding of AI, and it will destroy the value of most human work, creative and non-creative. The power to do exactly what your job is with the push of a button, for free, in seconds. If it's not already here, it's coming. Ubiquity kills the value of anything. Anything short of an actual boycott on AI produced work/art will result in this.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  What makes you correct, while the generations of your ancestors who said similar things weren't?
  - palata 2y ago
    What makes them wrong?
  - zero_shift 2y ago
    Were they incorrect? Most preventative measures were, at some stage, speculation or moral panics. For example our consumer laws emerged out of anxiety about poisonous food. Our libel laws emerged out of moral panics about misuse of the press. Etc. But were still good measures. There's also the asymmetric risk element. The social risks of the technology are larger than the material risks of putting it off. Being wary of that isn't Luddism, it's just math
  - joe_the_user 2y ago
    I don't think generations of my ancestors made any predictions about AI /s. I mean, an argument that "technology" hasn't eliminated work previously so we can assume it won't do so now is ridiculously broad. I don't even think current LLMs will eliminate all jobs - I think it's limited to a particular kind of mediocre output, an output the demand for which is very elastic. But an arguments about what "AI" can do should based on it's potential, not on some "technology has always created jobs" incantation.
  - notfed 2y ago
    To support the grand-post but reword it: we're on the verge of AI becoming a "great creativity equalizer". It used to be that each individual had a "skill level" on a scale from 0-100 for each practice, where very few people were above level 60. But now everyone can be a level 60+ artist, if they want to be. This lower limit will keep rising and, at a certain point (and maybe were talking 1000 years) it will be hard for anyone to differentiate any everyday media from human- vs AI-generated. Maybe equality is good? For utilities like locomotion, that sounds great. But for creativity? I think what will happen is a later generation will grow up bombarded by level-100 art and music. I guess that sounds net positive...right? As a musician, I can tell you one thing: part of what gives me drive to make music is knowing that what I'm creating is a scarce resource. (For example, if I realize one of my songs sounds like another existing song, it stops sounding good to me.) If it comes that AI can generate new songs for me, all of that value I assign to creating music is lost.
Terr_ 2y ago
Like leaded gasoline and subprime CDOs? The dangerous interactions were already known, the risk-level was criticized, but there was money to be made...
joe_the_user 2y ago
Generative AI accelerates the productivity of productive people, and potentially replaces the efforts of button-pusher types adding minimal value or creative input to a process. I've seen this rough formula applied to earlier tech. But it's hard to see how, if AI/LLM usage consists of mainly in simple commands ("prompts"), it won't be about making people into "button-pusher types" or just empowering exactly those types. Indeed, one of the draws of generative AI is that it allows managers/marketers to get default mediocre illustrations for a text without having to consult with an artist or even a stock-photo agency (which peddled things made by artists - up until now).
- brk 2y ago
  You are correct in those examples, but I think it also opens up new avenues for creation. I can design reasonably decent PCBs (up to 4 layers), I can hack together not-terrible code in a handful of languages from embedded-C (eg: ESP32 stuff) up to Windows or linux apps. But I absolutely suck at graphic design and basic layout. Many of my creative projects stall at the UI level, and rarely are they worth paying someone to help. I've been using genAI tools to help with design, layout, etc. things. I can also see the inverse, someone who may be good at design and can craft something that just oozes "use me", but perhaps they struggle with coding, genAI tools might allow them to use robust components, like ESP32's with attached touchscreens, to build things previously out of reach to them. This seems to me like something that can propel things forward, but potentially at the cost of a person whose previous job was mostly editing powerpoint slides on the corporate template.
notfed 2y ago
> This reads like someone who doesn't have a solid understanding of the underpinnings at generative AI. They're talking about the future, though. You are correct that they, nor you or I, have a solid understanding of technology in the future.
trescenzi 2y ago
I'm not sure we read the same piece. The title is hyperbolic, they all are these days, but the content is much more measured. And I suspect you might even agree with the second to last paragraph: > In my own practice, I’m learning to use AI not as a tool of compression, but one of expansion. Prompts become not endpoints but starting points. They create new voids to explore, new territories for my mind to inhabit.
sonofhans 2y ago
The examples you cite — PCs, robots, locomotives, printing presses — each caused various clear harms. LLMs will do the same. Waving off these harms as lack of understanding on someone else’s part doesn’t make them go away. Some of the things you haven’t listed — air conditioning, internal combustion engines, car-centric cities — are busy causing so much harm that our biosphere is showing the strain. Other things you haven’t listed — government-subsidized sugar production, sedentary lifestyles due to constant PC use — are busy causing so much harm to out bodies that humans are dying of simultaneous over-indulgence and despair. People warning about these harms were _right_, and in each case they were greeted by similar dismissiveness. No technology guarantees a rosy future. All of it has a cost, some of those costs are very heavy, and some are permanent.
- brk 2y ago
  I think you're mixing in too many technologies. I used the examples I did because they were all things that essentially directly offset or replaced human labor. Air conditioners did not replace humans in jobs, they made indoor spaces more habitable. The internal combustion engine alone did not directly replace people, we didn't really have at that point humans turning cranks all day, the IC engine was a component of bigger machines. Several of the other examples you mentioned definitely had negative impacts as well as positive ones, but they were never really seen as creating risk to peoples ability to earn money. If anything, they created new industries and jobs. AI will definitely offset some jobs that are menial or able to be done with low cognitive effort. But historically those kinds of things have always been overtaken by the progression of human invention. Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned lamplighters as an example. "Jobs" are frequently replaced by progression. "Careers" less so (but not totally immune).
  - sonofhans 2y ago
    I understand your point about labor replacement. Consider your POV, though: one person’s “menial” is another person’s stretch goal; one person’s “low cognitive effort” is another person’s maximum capacity. What of these people? As the efficiency of our means of production increases, so too does its ability to leave behind those who are not your so-called “productive people.” Now, we have more than enough wealth in this country to solve that problem to everyone’s benefit, and I’d like to think that we will. However, some of those most directly involved and invested in bringing on the AI-powered future are literally right now attempting to gut the social safety net for the same country. So, truthfully, I don’t believe a word of it. I think that an AI-powered future is just another ladder that the super-privileged want to climb and then pull up after themselves.
scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
Yeah but this also doesn’t read like something that pretends to get into the underpinnings of AI. It’s about the friction that AI removes from making things and the discomfort with what that might mean. This point is fair and your take on productive people is reductive. People aren’t 1:1 factories. I’ve been watching my spouse participate in a seriously intensive prestigious typography course. It’s quite fascinating to watch how a part of the process involves slow walking through all of the tedious hand lettering stuff. Like mr. Miyagi level training. The depth and complexity of things they’re discovering and learning at a deep level by hand is quite enlightening. It would not be possible to convey other than by this process - to understand how to design typography you basically have to practically engage with how it was in every other earlier historical period. I believe this is the essence of the point of the article - that working through your ideas by hand involved lots of friction which was valuable in training you how to slow down your thinking. And now that is being done away and everyone can fart out nuanced BS and disregard anything that is more than a paragraph long.

KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago

That's why it's so important for R1 to show the reasoning. The creative process has to be transparent and easily understood.

oilkillsbirds 2y ago

[flagged]

palata 2y ago

I totally agree with that feeling. I have been trying to use AI for coding. Sometimes it is very bad, but I got to learn when it is surprisingly good. Many times, the AI can show me some code that doesn't work, but that I can simply tune and make work. Many times the resulting code is good: it's not like some copy-pasting by someone who doesn't understand it. In a PR, nobody would think it's an AI, it could have been written by me. It was, in a way. But intellectually, I did much less. I did not have to imagine what kind of API may exist that solves the problem, or read the documentation about those candidate APIs. I did not have to build the code from the ground up, maybe starting with a simple case, then adding a loop, then going for tail recursion, and back to a loop, etc. Not doing that admittedly made me more productive. But it really feels like I didn't improve my skills by doing it. I didn't get to discover other parts of the API that I don't need right now but that may be useful later. I didn't get to build my intuition of whether a loop or tail recursion is better here. I just tuned stuff. What happens when I've been doing this for year and now need to debug that code? Will I have the intuition needed to find where it may be failing? Not clear to me. It feels similar to learning a language: I may understand a lot, and if people talk to me slowly and offer me different alternatives, I may be able to say "yes, the second one!". But by doing that I'm not improving my talking in this language. The only way to get fluent, I feel, is to make this effort of constructing sentences, looking for the words, finding ways or working around words I don't know, etc. If I don't do that, I will never be fluent. AI makes me more productive now, but may prevent me from becoming fluent at all.

CamperBob2 2y ago
But it really feels like I didn't improve my skills by doing it. The process of finding the right prompt to get the most out of the LLM is programming. You aren't doing anything different, you just switched languages.
- realce 2y ago
  Abstraction is the opposite of precision.
  - 2y ago

joshdavham 2y ago

> the resistance of a surface against a pen or pencil creates an important friction that works its way through your body and into your mind. That resistance is valuable; it forces us to slow down. Beautifully said and fully agree! In my personal work, I’m always trying to find ways to slow down my thinking when the problems get hard. Even using a pen vs a keyboard is a great way to do this.

ada1981 2y ago

I’m curious why the author choose to publish his message on the internet vs. walking door to door to spread it. It’s almost as if his desire to use technology was to collapse the process between idea and transmission. I appreciate a nostalgia for process to some extent. I enjoyed my 200km walk across the mountains Corsica far more than the plane ride from New Mexico to France… However it’s possible that you can actually become more aware of and participate in the larger process. Are I here to spend a month hand drawing my logo and refining it, or am I here to build an AI disaster response system to save a million lives? While I can see the appeal of these sort of arguments, and agree with much of it, I’m not sold on the value of process in itself in the larger arc of the process of creating actual value for the world.

scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
I guess let us know when you actually deliver that “AI disaster response system” because that’s the wild leap in your logic there. The author did not choose to express that it should all be done by hand. His point is that there is a value in slowing down your thinking by doing stuff by hand. Logos and unformed ideas being a mere example to illustrate a point. In your case it sounds like the equivalent would be to actually go out and participate in an actual disaster response effort before reaching for AI or using AI to tell actual responders how to do their job.
- ada1981 2y ago
  Why stop at hand drawn logos though?

guybedo 2y ago

As technology evolves, humans lose their capacities as their tools get better. What's the average human's mental calculation capacities compared to our ancestors when the electronic calculator didn't exist ? Who can calculate integrals by hand nowadays ? AI is the ultimate tool. Who needs to get a phd when your computer can do the work / solve the task better than you would do and in a fraction of the time you'd require. Sure there's still gonna be a need for specialists but on average most humans are losing their capacities because their tools get better.

angelsbrood 2y ago
Then we need new capacities, attentive to our emergent means, and institutional frameworks capable of germinating them.
techwiz137 2y ago
Might be true, but I have a form of dyscalculia that made almost any sort of math impossible for me, so for this it doesn't affect me as I am not capable either way. But AI has taken away my ability to think to solve a problem via code. Now all I do is just ask it.
SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
> As technology evolves, humans lose their capacities as their tools get better. I don't follow this argument. Did humans become LESS capable when they invented a hammer?
- palata 2y ago
  Surely we became less capable at solving that problem without a hammer.
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    If we had the hammer taken away we'd figure it out again. We got better at things, but we didn't actually lose any capacity.

educasean 2y ago

AI is quickly blurring the line between makers and curators. If the next wave of advancement in logo-generating AI will allow us to converse with it meaningfully and work with it as a creative director might work with her associate designer, is it really a fatal flaw that the AI is not able to conjure up an editable PSD file? Is it really necessary that the AI produce a pile of sketches that led to the final product instead of working backwards from the final design to fake a trail of inspirations? As curators we still need to slow down and take our time to ensure that the design we select is a good fit for whatever requirements we're working towards. I don't think a blazing fast AI necessarily erases that or takes that option away from us.

cyanydeez 2y ago

This, but all civilized society. Vaccines are a great example.

toprerules 2y ago

Technology has diminishing returns. If technology does everything for us then what's the point of existing.

nateburke 2y ago

All the AI researchers I know that also happen to be parents will not let their kids NEAR tools like chatgpt and photomath. No, it's "traditional" things for their kids that are CHALLENGING and require practice, like woodworking, learning an instrument, sports, memorizing texts for fun.

atomic128 2y ago

The use of LLMs for constructive activities (writing, coding, etc.) rapidly produces a profound dependence. Try turning it off for a day or two, you're hobbled, incapacitated. Anecdotally, ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw). Funny stuff. Competition in the workplace forces us down this road to being utterly dependent. Human intellect atrophies through disuse. In the arts, we see something different. People don't seem to like AI-generated content. For example, I monitor a random sample of recent pornography (random 4-second slideshow from all over the Internet, some scary stuff, see https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/ https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/) and AI-generated porn is still very niche, comparable in frequency to small fetishes like elder or latex or rope porn. I expected it to be more popular, but generally humans prefer something else. As Tim Cook recently said, (paraphrased) once you start using Apple Intelligence to think and work, it's hard to stop. Those skills that you no longer use will be lost. This is the profitable new addiction, and programmers like us are the first group of people to become hooked.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
The response among programmers honestly feels very bimodal. There seems to be the camp that just loves LLMs and have turned to Copilot for everything. Personally, I used it to mock unit tests and that's all I really trust it with. Once I get to a problem I can't easily solve it's something obscure enough that there isn't a lot of web traffic for it and Copilot falls over too, so I find myself rarely using it. Sometimes it's helpful as an intellisense, but a lot of the time it's too slow even for that. Its value as a text generator or, god help us, a search engine, has also run thin for me. I don't ever use it. I still prefer my google searches and going directly to sites.
- palmotea 2y ago
  > There seems to be the camp that just loves LLMs and have turned to Copilot for everything. I wonder if that's the same camp that wrote crappy half-ass code before LLMs? There are a lot of people like that.

kazinator 2y ago

What evolved intelligent life is processes that intelligent life has the power to erase.

xenadu02 2y ago

I wonder... LLMs currently work because they have a huge corpus of data to train against. Data generated by humans. What happens when almost all available data is computer-generated? When no new training datasets are available? Will the models feed back on themselves? Will they stagnate and cease improving? Perhaps we'll enter a world where everything new and unique made by human authors (text, art, source code) is jealously guarded in an attempt to keep the LLMs out - lest even a single model learn it and spread it to all the others almost instantly making the original author's work worthless.

kazinator 2y ago

Image-to-vector software will produce an editable file out of a logo image. And there is AI for that! Within seconds of searching I found something called Vectorizer.AI, and others. Not sure how well they work, but the basic premise is that you could use any text-to-image AI to come up with a logo and then image to vector AI to create SVG that is likely editable. If that doesn't work well today, it likely will in two or three years.

Xen9 2y ago

The title is semantically questionable: - US? - AI has power to erase? I did not create AI & believe even autonomous AI systems are for time under human moral responsibility. The effect of AI socially obviously is that there will be no public forums, so we get back to middle ages, except the peasant is smarter & more obedient, which is a good mix for mental health issues. Regardless, when one needs more data: 1) Pick small nation with slow democracy & bureaucracy 2) Do massive AI horde campaign targeting politicians & keeping them busy 3) Simultaneously ship SpaceX connected drones in crates & humanoid robots. 4) Now the people cannot sleep in peace & you start gathering behavioral surplus very effectively. 5) Sell behavioral data & reinvest in sociological ruin of the government before they close OODA. The interesting step is what happens when standard baseline human has eventually no more surplus to give. I would guess models develop far enough that you can nudge the non-wallnut humans who don't care about privacy or anything to vote for candidates that then pass laws to outroot more eccentric people by cutting the rights to any sort of privacy. I personally believe in the instrumentalist view of philosophy of science & endorse the "instrumentarian power" term Zuboff coined for this. It's the very significant difference, Zuboff probably said it also but I cannot recall as I read the work young, that would you rather have no free will and no one else's interest dominates completely over yours or would you rather have no free will and some other human have chosen what matters? As endgame, such state makes lots of AI alignment literature paradigmatically obsolete.

tim333 2y ago

It's a nice essay but the premise that human intelligence and creativity will be erased because we'll have AI to do it seems a bit silly. I know a lot of people who use LLMs and it seems mostly unchanged in them.